Itinerary Help 8/24 – 9/8; Plus Some Logistical Questions

3 comments

1. Hi!

   Your 11 year old daughter will need her own IC. She can get a physical one, she does not need one in an Apple Wallet. It will just mean you need to use cash to add more onto the card. You can get her either a Welcome Suica or Child’s Suica because she is 1/2 price. They will want to check her passport to make sure she is 12 or under. And her name will be put on the card, my daughter has one.

   Since you’re from Seattle, please be aware Summers in Japan are super humid. I know Seattle can be hot in the Summer, but it tends to be a dry heat vs. Tokyo is more like any large city on the East Coast in August.

   Anyone can buy tickets to the Ghibli Museum (in Tokyo)) and Ghibli Park (in Nagoya) now. They sell out fast for the museum. If you get desperate Willer has a more expensive package that includes tickets, but they sell out too. The Park restricts what area foreigners can buy tickets for, but you can buy tickets. They go fast.

   I think the 26th is really light. I can’t imagine spending a day on just those activities.

   The Pokemon Cafe is not located in Skytree. You can certainly go to the Pokemon Center in Skytree. But the Cafe is located in the Takashimaya in Nihombashi. Make sure you know where you are going and give yourself time to get between the two. The Kirby Cafe is located in Skytree.

   you will be spending much longer than an hour on Takeshita dori because on a Sunday during the Japanese school break you are going to have a 20+ minute line for each food place you want to visit.

   Most stores in Akihabara are not going to open until between 10 and noon. You might want to have something to do before 11 that is somewhere else. Owl Cafes are cruel, but if you are OK with that, it’s on you.

   Give yourself more time when Going to Tokyo Disney because you still need to get from Maihama to either park. For land, you can walk it in round 15 minutes, but Sea you really need to catch the monorail or take some sort of bus. I think we did a monorail last time.

   Make sure you install and set up the Tokyo Disney App ahead of time. It works on Android phones, I assume it works on Apple.

   Why are you going back to Skytree and Harajuku on your second week end?

   Pokemon Sweets doesn’t take reservations and is located in Ikebukuro not Shibuya.

   I could have sworn shinkansen tickets can only be bought 30 days in advance

   It’s 6 of one half dozen of the other whether a 1 week pass is worth it for your trip to Osaka. It’s definitely not worth it to get a JR Pass while you are in Tokyo unless you are planning things not in your itinerary. A lot of your travel is going to be a mix of local trains and subways.

   Good luck!

2. I am in Japan rn and don’t have too much to offer on your itinerary (as I didn’t do the theme parks or go to most of these places) except for the fact that I found Harajuku extremely underwhelming and very tourist-trappy, so unless you have loads of things to tick off there I wouldn’t suggest going on 2 separate days.

   I didn’t get Ghibli tickets as they sold out within hours for me (I am from the UK so stayed up until 2am UK time to buy, but the website crashed for me as soon as tickets went live and when I got back on an hour later I was 11,000th in the queue), but yes it is open to foreigners now and they do go live the month before on the 10th at 10am JST, so good luck as they will sell out quickly. One suggestion to consider adding to the plan would be TeamLab which I imagine would be a good exhibit with the kids (not sure if Borderless will re-open by then, but I think Planets is open until the end of the year).

   I would just reserve Shinkansen tickets once in Japan as (similar to what the other commenter has said) your Tokyo itinerary is mostly subway journeys, and the few local JR trains you will get can just be done with Suica cards – saves you having to bring the physical exchange orders and queue up to exchange etc. It also means you can reserve seats on the faster Nozomi services which aren’t included in the JR Pass, they only stop at the major stations between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka and I believe they are more frequent than the Hikari and Kodama services (which are included in the JR Pass)

   The self use ticket machines can all be switched to English, and (unless due to any summer holidays meaning the trains are packed) you should be fine reserving them a week in advance, we managed to reserve seats (only 2 of us with JR Passes but plenty of options even without Nozomi trains) easily on the Shinkansen just a couple of days in advance between Tokyo and Kyoto.

   Good luck with your trip!

3. Definitely don’t need to do Harajuku on 2 separate days.

   I recommend checking out some neighborhoods out of the big 3 or 4 that you seem to be sticking to. Koenji, Kichijoji (especially if you’re already at Ghibli), Shimokitazawa, Daikanyama, Nakameguro, Ebisu, Ueno, etc.).